Today’s Commexis Cast discusses Facebook’s latest tactic in the fight against fake news. Now, articles Facebook deems to be inaccurate will appear significantly smaller on the Newsfeed and appear next to fact checking links.

Facebook’s previous attempts to fight fake news have been particularly ineffective. Originally, the social network flagged content it believed to be false. However, that only increased the likelihood of it being shared, I suspect because of individuals who didn’t appreciate those sites being labelled as “false”. Afterwards, Facebook removed the flag and began placing fact-checking articles next to the false pieces.

Their newest tactic continues the fact-checking article placement while also severely minimizing the the size of the article link. Tech Crunch had a fantastic comparison (below) of how an article deemed inaccurate would be displayed compared to a regular article.

As you can see, the size difference is significant with fake articles being about 10 times smaller than normal links.

Facebook also said they’ll be using machine learning to better locate fake accounts and have them terminated, have groups and pages that share fake news have their ability to advertise revoked, and analyze the articles and place them in the fact-checking queue to speed the fact-checking process.

Facebook believes it can cut down the amount of fake news by 80 percent. We’ll see whether this execution helps achieve that goal, or if this strategy reaches the same pitfalls as the others.